24 April 2011

Michael Brennan and Lee Langley will speak at Festival 2011





At the Graham Greene International Festival Michael G. Brennan (above, top) (Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Leeds, UK) and the writer Lee Langley (above, below; photo, Daily Mail) will be the guest speakers in Deans’ Hall, Berkhamsted School (Berkhamsted, UK) on the afternoon of Saturday 1st October 2011.

Prof. Brennan will speak on “Faith and Authorship in the Early Novels” of Graham Greene. Recently he published Fictions, Faith and Authorship (Continuum, 2010), which is a comprehensive reconsideration of Greene’s exploration of faith, doubt, literary versatility and authorial identity in his fictions and other writings.

Award-winning novelist and travel-writer, Lee Langley will speak on “Traps and Escapes”, and will discuss the pleasures and problems of adaptation and the lure of faraway places to writers of fiction. She wrote the screen adaptation of Greene's The Tenth Man, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Prof. Brennan’s research interests include: (i) the writings in manuscript and print, literary patronage, and public careers of the Sidneys of Penshurst and the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, of Wilton between 1500 and 1700; (ii) the writings of Graham Greene and in particular various aspects of religious faith in Greene’s fiction and his travel writings, his close and creative relationship with Evelyn Waugh, and the often polarised responses of literary biography to Greene’s career; and (iii) travel writings in manuscript and print between 1500 and 1700, especially relating to Western Europe and the Levant.

He welcomes enquiries from prospective research students who are interested in pursuing topics relating to Renaissance Studies, Graham Greene and Travel Writings.

Lee Langley is the author of several novels, including Changes of Address (1987), a largely autobiographical account of her childhood in India and the first in a loose trilogy of novels set in India. It was followed by Persistent Rumours (1992), which won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Fiction) and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book), and A House in Pondicherry (1995). Her novel, Distant Music (2001), spans six centuries in a narrative that begins on the Portuguese island of Madeira in the fifteenth century, and ends in London in the year 2000. Twice she has been short-listed for the Hawthornden Prize.

She has also written several film scripts and screenplays, including television adaptations of stories by Rumer Godden and Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance, as well as a play, Baggage.